Actor and singer Lee Min Ho held a New Year’s countdown concert in China on December 31. The concert recorded the highest viewer rating among concurrent New Year’s special broadcasts.

Every New Year’s Eve, the three biggest television networks in China, DragonTV, HNTV, and ZJSTV, host countdown concerts featuring top stars. Lee Min Ho chose to participate in DragonTVs concert after receiving many requests.

During his performance, Lee Min Ho awed the audience with a fresh arrangement of his unreleased song “Will You Be My Last Love” among others.

A source from DragonTV revealed, “After Lee Min Ho made his appearance, viewership rating went up by approximately 1.7 percent, and out of all the countdown concerts in China [we] recorded the highest rating.”

A representative of Lee Min Ho’s management agency Star House Entertainment remarked, “When you consider China’s population of 1.4 billion, even 0.1 percent is staggering. We’ll get a real sense of [the number] when precise viewership rating reports are released next week.”

The concert was also streamed through online and mobile platforms. When Lee Min Ho’s appearance drew near, the number of viewers increased so quickly that there were buffering issues. Immediately after Lee Min Ho’s performance, China’s biggest SNS platform Weibo and other portal sites were plastered with Lee Min Ho’s name, and some playback streaming sites crashed due to traffic overload. In just one day, videos of Lee Min Ho’s performance reached 5 million views.

This is not the first time Lee Min Ho participated in a New Year’s concert in China. Last year, he appeared in CCTV’s end-of-the-year spectacular “Chunwan,” which also recorded the highest viewership rating for its time slot.